Flush with campaign cash and facing down a possible Senate impeachment trial, President Trump headlined his first major rally of the election year Thursday in Ohio -- and almost immediately, the president capitalized on his order to take out Iranian
commander Qassem Soleimani after the military leader was said to have
orchestrated an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq.
In unequivocal terms, Trump slammed House Democrats' nonbinding War Powers Resolution, which passed earlier in the day in a rebuke to the Soleimani strike. Trump went on to suggest that Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and "Liddle' pencil-neck"
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., would have
tipped off the media about the operation had they known about it.
"They're
saying, 'You should get permission from Congress, you should come in
and tell us what you want to do -- you should come in and tell us, so
that we can call up the fake news that's back there, and we can leak
it,'" Trump said. "Lot of corruption back there."
The president
added that it would have been impractical to have alerted Congress,
given the "split-second" nature of the decision to kill Soleimani.
Separately,
Trump said he hoped former Vice President Joe Biden would become the
Democrats' presidential nominee, and pledged he would highlight what he
called the Bidens' corruption all throughout the campaign.
"He
will hear, 'Where's Hunter?',' every single debate nine times at the
podium," Trump vowed, in reference to Biden's son, who largely has
stayed out of public view after it emerged that he held lucrative
overseas board roles while his father was vice president.
Republicans have accused Hunter Biden, who recently was determined to have fathered a child with an Arkansas ex-stripper, of selling access to his father.
Trump was speaking before a packed crowd
in Toledo after apparently pulling back from the brink of war with Iran
earlier this week, and just hours after officials announced that Iran likely shot down a civilian airliner carrying
dozens of Canadians, apparently by mistake. Canadian Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau suggested the U.S. might bear responsibility, and he declined to condemn Iran.
For the most part, the rally focused on the Iran strike and the response to it from the political left.
"The
radical left Democrats have expressed outrage over the termination of
this horrible terrorist," Trump said. "Instead, they should be outraged
by Soleimani's savage crimes and the fact that his countless victims
were denied justice for so long."
Trump said he had acted swiftly
after the earlier attack at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and essentially
overruled a commander who said the military response would not arrive
until the next day. The situation, Trump said, easily could have become
"another Benghazi" -- a reference to the deadly 2012 attack at the U.S.
consulate in Libya.
"I said, 'nope, get in the planes right now,
have them there immediately!'" Trump said. "And, they got there
immediately. ... If you dare threaten our citizens, you do so at your
own grave peril."
Former President Obama, Trump added, had erred
by giving billions to Iran as part of the mostly defunct Iran nuclear
deal, including a massive cash payout loaded onto U.S. aircraft.
"By
subsidizing Iran's maligned conduct, the last administration was
leading the world down the path of war," Trump said. "We are restoring
our world to the path of peace, peace through strength."
The
campaign event offered Trump an opportunity to spotlight before a
friendly crowd his decision to order the deadly drone strike
against Soleimani, while keeping the U.S. -- at least for the moment --
out of a wider military conflict.
Trump also emphasized the booming economy, including a strong stock market and historically low unemployment rates.
"Unemployment
has reached the lowest level in over 51 years," Trump said.
"African-American, Hispanic American and Asian American unemployment
have all reached the lowest rates ever, ever, ever recorded. Wages are
rising fast, and the biggest percentage increase -- makes me happy --
are for blue-collar workers. Forty million American families are now
benefiting from the Republican child-tax credit, each receiving an
average of over $2,200 a year."
Trump added that getting rid of
"job-killing regulations" had helped spur the industrial sector. He
later invoked the destructive and widespread "yellow vest" protests in
France, which had started out of frustration with high taxes on gas.
"If you dare threaten our citizens, you do so at your own grave peril."
— President Trump
"America
lost 60,000 factories under the previous administration ... They're all
coming back," Trump said. "And, right now, just in a very short period
of time, we've added 12,000 brand new factories and many more are coming
in."
The United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement [USMCA], Trump
said, would improve the economy further and make the U.S. automobile
industry in particular more competitive.
The Democrats' policies,
Trump argued, have produced chaos and poverty. Trump specifically ripped
Pelosi, D-Calif., for living in a mansion in San Francisco, even as her
"disgusting" district filled with homeless people defecating on the
streets.
Trump additionally touted the recent appellate court ruling
that green-lit funding for his border wall, slammed "late-term abortion
and ripping babies right from the mother's womb right up until the
mother's womb," and highlighted Obama's broken promise to ensure
Americans could keep their doctors under his health-care plan.
"We will protect patients with preexisting conditions, and we will protect your preexisting physician," Trump vowed.
The
president's reelection campaign already had used Facebook ads to
highlight Trump’s decision to strike Soleimani, regarded as Iran’s
second-most-powerful official.
"We caught a total monster, and we
took him out, and that should have happened a long time ago,” Trump said
before departing Washington earlier in the day.
Last week’s
killing of Soleimani brought long-simmering tensions between the U.S.
and Iran to a boil. Iran, in retaliation, fired a barrage of missiles
this week at two military bases in neighboring Iraq that have housed
hundreds of U.S. troops. But, with no reported injuries to U.S. or Iraqi
troops, Trump said he had no plans to take further military action
against Iran and instead would enact more sanctions against the Islamic
Republic.
The Iran crisis, which momentarily overshadowed Trump's
looming impeachment trial, also has opened a new front in the 2020
presidential campaign for Trump, who in 2016 campaigned in part on a
promise to end American involvement in "endless wars."
Trump
entered the election year flush with over $100 million in campaign
cash, a low unemployment rate and an unsettled field of Democrats
seeking to challenge him. Yet, polling showed he remained vulnerable.
Back
in December, an AP-NORC poll showed Trump's approval rating at 40
percent. No more recent major polls have emerged to gauge support for
the president in the wake of the targeted killing of Soleimani, though
opinions of Trump have changed little over the course of his presidency.
Trump
has never fallen into historic lows for a president’s approval ratings,
but Gallup polling showed his December rating registered lower than
that of most recent presidents at the same point in their first terms.
Notably, approval of Trump and Obama in the Decembers before their
reelection bids was roughly the same.
For Trump to win reelection,
securing Ohio's 18 electoral votes will be critical. He won Ohio by
eight points in 2016, after Obama held the state in 2008 and 2012. The
visit to Toledo marked Trump's 15th appearance in Ohio as president.
Trump
has anchored his reelection messaging around a solid national economy
with an unemployment rate of 3.5 percent. But, people in parts of the
industrial Midwest have said they've been left behind, especially as the
manufacturing sector has struggled over the past year in response to
slower worldwide economic growth and trade tensions with China.
Labor
Department figures showed construction and factory jobs slumping in
Ohio. In nearby Michigan, manufacturers were shedding workers as well,
but so were that state’s employers in the health care, education and
social assistance sectors.
But, the Toledo area pointed at an even
more alarming trend in an otherwise healthy economy. The Glass City has
shedded over 6 percent of its white-collar jobs in the professional and
business services sector over the past year, causing the total number
of jobs to slump slightly from a year ago.
As an incumbent, Trump
has been able to use his position to build a massive campaign cash
reserve at a time when Democrats have been raising and spending theirs
in a competitive primary. Although many White House hopefuls, most
notably Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor
Pete Buttigieg, have pulled in massive sums, there has been no clear
front-runner, and many party officials have been girding for a
protracted contest that could further bleed the eventual nominee of
resources.
Trump,
meanwhile, raised $46 million in the final quarter of 2019 and had over
$102 million cash on hand at the end of the year. The Republican
National Committee [RNC], which hasn’t faced as strict a set of
contribution limits as the candidate, raised even more. Under the
current rules, the RNC won’t have to release its December fundraising
numbers until the end of the month.
Asked how much he was willing
to spend on his reelection, Trump said, "I literally haven't even
thought about it." He added: "I will say this: Because of the
impeachment hoax, we're taking in numbers that nobody ever expected. You
saw the kind of numbers we're reporting. We're blowing everybody away."
Fox News' Andrew O'Reilly and The Associated Press contributed to this report.